DiaBLOGue
Dowser’s Prayer
April 16, 2025I am religious
the way small desert towns
are named after water;
eleven or twenty worn buildings,
brown hills, dust.
Holy Places
April 16, 2025No Celestial room has ever compared
to the stalk of yellow bluestem held in my son’s teeth
three-quarters of a mile into a Sunday afternoon walk,
feathered seeds dancing with every step.
Golden Plates Ode
April 16, 2025Were they fake news? Etched
on tin? Did the boy prophet
really find them sequestered
A December Poem
April 16, 2025Under the dome above, we look up,
singing children’s canticles,
our own domed hearts
clutched by the promise
O Utah, Where’s Your Shame!: A Review of Two Mountain Meadows Massacre Books | Richard E. Turley, Jr., and Barbara Jones Brown, Vengeance Is Mine, and Janiece Johnson, Convicting the Mormons
April 16, 2025The Mountain Meadows Massacre is a hugely important (and hugely tragic) topic in the history of both Utah and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That is why it is so notable that…
Invigorating the Latter-day Saint Pioneer Woman Narrative | Martine Leavitt, Buffalo Flats
April 16, 2025“Rebecca had heard her father and others call this land God’s country often enough that she wasn’t as surprised as she might have been to come upon him, one warm spring evening, sitting on the…
The Power of Three: A Trio of Poetsand Mormon Feminist Poetics | Heather Harris-Bergevin, Katabasis; Susan Elizabeth Howe, Infinite Disguises; and Darlene Young, Here
April 16, 2025In her introduction to her book Katabasis, Heather Harris-Bergevin quotes someone who accused her at one time of “consorting with witches.” The word “witch” comes from an Old English “wicce,” meaning “female magician or sorceress.”…
A Brush with Mormonism’s Ghosts | Mason Kamana Allred, Seeing Things: Technologies of Vision and the Making of Mormonism
April 16, 2025Media scholars, take note: Mason Kamana Allred’s Seeing Things: Technologies of Vision and the Making of Mormonism is a haunting must-read that will leave you ghost hunting across other lanes of media history. After pointing…
Contextualizing and Chronicling the Lives of Enslaved People in Utah Territory | Amy Tanner Thiriot, Slavery in Zion: A Documentary and Genealogical History of Black Lives and Black Servitude in Utah Territory, 1847–1862
April 16, 2025Genealogical research has long played a prominent role in the theology and lived religious experiences of individuals, families, and communities associated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). Given this reality, one…
